Around half of Australian enterprises are at nascent stage of mobility maturity, with businesses currently deploying ad-hoc or opportunistic strategies.
According to IDC research, only one in 15 organisations across the country are using mobility as a competitive differentiator and an enabler for new business models.
Consequently, Australia slipped to 5th place in enterprise mobility maturity in 2016 across the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) region, with maturity not surging ahead compared to regional neighbours.
Despite a lack of market maturity however, there are a few Australian organisations that are at advanced stages of mobility journeys, with dedicated platforms and architectures for mobile to be a primary mode of usage.
But most mobile use cases are isolated, uncoordinated initiatives implemented in silos without the necessary coordination between IT and lines of business (LOBs), with a lot to be desired from Australian businesses.
“As enterprises continue to fine-tune their mobile computing experience, integration with the extended business application ecosystem is inevitable,” IDC senior research manager Sabharinath Bala said.
“The enterprise mobility ecosystem continues to expand beyond mobile devices and mobile enterprise applications as organisations create newer, unconventional use cases, such as smart devices, wearables, connected vehicles, and mobile-enabled machine-to-machine communication."
According to Bala, Australian businesses become more concerned with mobile applications: their procurement, development, and management as they move up the maturity ladder.
“As they move further up the scale, their concerns converge on a holistic approach to the mobility of their IT systems and the role of mobility in business strategy,” Bala explained.
Looking ahead, Bala said enterprise mobile strategy needs to augment other 3rd Platform pillars, especially cloud and analytics, with the Internet of Things (IoT) effectively extending the business value of enterprise mobility.
“It's critical to future-proof the roadmap by including provisions for the production deployments related to wearables, and augmented reality (AR),” Bala explained.
